In the latest SKCM news, Benjamin Guyer reveals the text of a vow made by Charles I at Oxford on April 16, 1646, to return all Monastery and other Church lands held by the Crown since Henry VIII stole them – this included “…any Abbey, or other Religious House.” Granted that this did not include such lands in private hands, it represents a return to the Marian settlement in this area, taken together with his oft-expressed desire for reunion with the Holy See. One cannot but help be struck with the resemblance of this vow to that of Louis XVI to the Sacred Heart.

[#21 in the series This Week in English Catholic History: Week of January 20 – 26]

HIS week in English Catholic History, on January 25th, 1533 the execrable Henry VIII, King of England, consummated his break with the Catholic Church by taking the extreme step of marrying his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn, without obtaining an annulment from Rome of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. This action, in direct defiance of the Pope, precipitated Henry’s declaration of himself as the Head of the Church of England (1534), and guaranteed Henry’s excommunication (1538) over his annulment of his marriage to Catherine for Anne.

The sad truth is that in medieval Europe, annulments were frightfully easy to obtain for the rich and powerful, and were granted on dubious grounds in many cases. To cite just one example connected to English History, Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 – 1204) had been married to Louis VII of France, but the couple had their marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity (they were fourth cousins). In fact, the marriage was “annulled” because Eleanor failed to produce a male heir for Louis, though she had produced two daughters. But Eleanor was the wealthiest woman in all Europe. So just eight weeks later, Eleanor married Henry II of England – her THIRD cousin, and her junior by eleven years! – and would become the mother of the celebrated Richard the Lionheart, the infamous King John and six more children by Henry. Many, many more examples of dubious annulments could be given.

So, considering the moral cesspool in which most of the European nobility swam, ennabled by a corrupt church, Henry VIII might have expected the Pope to grant his request for what amounted to Catholic rubber-stamped divorce from Catherine.

Yet two circumstances prevented the Pope from acquiescing. Alas, the fact that Catherine insisted she was Henry’s wife and the mental state of either spouse at the time of their marriage probably did not factor into Pope Clement VII‘s decision, as it would in an annulment today.

First, Catherine was the aunt of the most powerful man in Europe, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles had Pope Clement in a military stranglehold. Approving the divorce was a slight against Charles’s family, and the Pope was unwilling to do this.

Secondly, the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine had already been granted through a special exception by the Pope, since Catherine had been Henry’s brother Arthur’s wife, ordinarily a canonical bar. But the would-be couple asserted that Catherine had not been able to consummate her marriage to Henry’s brother before his death, and therefore that marriage was not valid. Asking the Pope to invalidate the new marriage on the grounds Catherine had been Henry’s brother’s wife, that the Pope had already allowed at Henry’s request on the basis that she was not, was unprecedented and would further damage the Papacy’s already crumbling credibility. The Pope wouldn’t do it.

The marriage to Anne Boleyn was accomplished secretly, officiated by Thomas Cranmer who had been recalled from Germany four months earlier. The place is unknown, and there are even some contradictory accounts about the date, though most sources agree the marriage happened on this day. Unfortunately for Anne, the child born eight months and two weeks later on 7 September the same year would be female, the future Queen Elizabeth I, who would seek a middle way between the religion of her radical Puritan Protestant subjects and the Catholics and Catholic sympathisers to many of whom she was an illegitimate ruler, making reconciliation with the Catholic Church a practical impossibility.

Condemners of their own error, Henry VIII and Archbishop Cranmer would themselves annul the marriage to Anne on May 14th, 1536 in order for Henry to marry Jane Seymour. Anne was executed three days later by beheading for treason, adultery and witchcraft on May 17th, her body buried in an unmarked grave. Just thirteen days after on May 30th, Henry married Jane.

OR the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Robert Jastrow (1925 – 2008), God and the Astronomer (1978)

In many American settings today, Catholics have been urged not to physically shake hands while “passing the peace” in order to prevent the spread of disease.

While I was visiting Oregon recently where there is yet no obligation-fulfilling TEM (or any regular TEM in the state, alas) this happened and was announced from the pulpit at daily Mass. This article shows another recent example.

But in many Ordinariate parishes the peace is not passed in the first place, because, although many Episcopalian congregations do pass the Peace in a way reminiscent of a Meet-and-Greet social on a cruise ship, it is not part of our local traditions in many Ordinariate parishes.

I now have some time to look at Fr. Cantalamessa’s talks at the USCCB retreat, and came across this in the first talk:

The Cloud of Unknowing, at the beginning of his treatise on contemplation, gives to his readers an advice which is fundamental also for making a good retreat. In order to pierce the cloud of unknowing which exists above us, between us and God, we need to put first “a cloud of forgetting beneath us”, living aside for a time every problem, project or anxiety we may have at the moment. (Footnote to Chapter 5 of the Cloud of Unknowing)

I remember coming across The Cloud of Unknowing while in college, perhaps as a result of a course in religion. I loved it and its exhortations continue to speak to me.

Nearly all Christian mystics maintain that an essential characteristic of Christian mysticism is participation in the Body of Christ, which is to say, in the Christian community of faith. In other words, to be a Christian mystic, it is as important to be a follower of Christ as it is to be a mystic. And to be a follower of Christ means to express spirituality in a communal way. The above statements annoy a lot of people. Sorry about that, but that’s how it rolls.

Community. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us. Recently a reader of this blog forwarded me an email from a friend of his who criticizes some of Evelyn Underhill’s ideas in her book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. These two people, whom I’ll call “the reader” and “the friend,” were looking at a passage in Mysticism where Underhill describes two core mystical principles. I’ll post the complete email at the end of this post, but for now, here’s just the highlights.

Here are Underhill’s two principles, from Mysticism:

While mysticism is an essential element in full human religion, it can never be the whole content of such religion. It requires to be embodied in some degree in history, dogma and institutions if it is to reach the sense-conditioned human mind.

The antithesis between the religions of “authority” and of “spirit,” the “Church” and the “mystic,” is false. Each requires the other. (pages ix-x)

Underhill goes on to say:

The “exclusive” mystic, who condemns all outward forms and rejects the support of the religious complex, is an abnormality. He inevitably tends towards pantheism, and seldom exhibits in its richness the Unitive Life. It is the “inclusive” mystic, whose freedom and originality are fed but not hampered by the spiritual tradition within which he appears, who accepts the incarnational status of the human spirit, and can “find the inward in the outward as well as the inward in the inward,” who shows us in their fullness and beauty the life-giving possibilities of the soul transfigured in God.

What Evelyn Underhill is doing here is very simple: she is drawing a distinction between mysticism in a generic sense, and mysticism as specifically manifested within Christianity.

I was a do-it-myself Christian mystic in a sense during about a decade where I had a regular contemplative prayer discipline but no orthodox Christian community where I was prepared to sign on the dotted line that I believed any particular creed.

One one hand, I benefited greatly from the practise of entering that Cloud of Unknowing, and I believe God honors any honest searching for Him, regardless of the context, whether it’s in a big charismatic revival or through sitting still in a room, gently trying to stay aware of the present moment, the way I was doing. But the best and fastest spiritual growth came when I was anchored in a Christian community and learned how important it is to believe in order to understand rather than understand as a pre condition for believing.

Anyone else familiar with this book? With a similar contemplative practice?

[#20 in the series This Week in English Catholic History: Week of January 13 – 19]

HIS week in English Catholic History, we begin to celebrate the Octave of Unity from January 18th to the 25th. The Octave was created by Fr Paul of Graymoor, an Episcopalian priest and religious who brought his entire Anglican religious community corporately into union with the Catholic Church.

Fr. Paul was born Lewis Wattson to the Rev Joseph Wattson and his wife, Mary on January 16th in Millington, Maryland. Rev Wattson was strongly influenced by the writings of John Henry Newman and the Oxford movement in the Anglican Church in England. He was dismissed from his Episcopalian seminary on suspicion of being a Jesuit spy. Nevertheless he went on to become the rector of a small parish in Maryland.

From 1882 to 1885, Lewis studied at the Episcopalian General Theological Seminary in New York.

in 1886, Lewis became an Episcopalian priest himself, serving as rector of St John’s Episcopal Church in Kingston, NY until 1895.

In 1893, Fr Lewis conceived of a religious order he wished to found, inspired by the life of St Francis of Assisi, Italy. Opening his Bible at random, his eyes fell upon Romans 5:11: “And not only so, but we also joy in God, through Our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.” Fr Lewis saw within the word “atonement” “At-one-ment”, and conceived the purpose of his order as bringing unity within the schism-troubled Church of God.

From 1895 to 1898, Fr Lewis joined and led a semi-monastic Episcopalian community of unmarried clergy in Omaha, Nebraska called the Associate Mission. During this period Fr Lewis corresponded with Sister Lurana White, discussing the possibilities of religious orders taking monastic vows within the Anglican Communion. Sister Lurana also went to visit the Anglican Sisters of Bethany in England to learn from their model. In 1898, Fr Lewis and Mother Lurana co-founded the Episcopalian Franciscan Friars and Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement in Garrison, New York. At this time, a common monastic practice, Fr Lewis took the religious name of Paul. They took possession of the Graymoor property in 1900.

Eight years later in 1908, Fr Paul created the Octave of Unity, a devotional intended to promote religious unity around the world.

On October 30th, 1909, Fr Paul and the Friars were accepted corporately into the Catholic Church as a community. In many ways this corporate reception foreshadowed the creation a century later of the Patrimonially English Ordinariates of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus (November 4th, 2009) which would permit the incorporation of entire parishes with their priests into the Catholic Church.

Day 1, January 18th: The union of all Christians in the One True Faith and in the Church

Day 2, January 19th: The return of separated Eastern Christians to communion with the Holy See

Day 3, January 20th: The reconciliation of Anglicans with the Holy See

Day 4, January 21st: The reconciliation of European Protestants with the Holy See

Day 5, January 22nd: That American Christians become one in union with the Chair of Peter

Day 6, January 23rd: The restoration of lapsed Catholics to the sacramental life of the Church

Day 7, January 24th: That the Jewish people come into their inheritance in Jesus Christ

Day 8, January 25th: The missionary extension of Christ’s Kingdom throughout the World

The National Catholic Reporter has provided a link to all the talks the Preacher of the Papal Household Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa gave at the recent retreat he offered for American bishops at the invitation of Pope Francis.

Texts of the 11 talks delivered to the U.S. bishops who gathered for a week’s retreat at Mundelein Seminary outside of Chicago show a heavy emphasis on traditional themes, a robust defense of celibacy, a severe criticism of attachment to money and an endorsement of new lay movements as a replacement for declining numbers of clerics.

I hope to set aside some time to read these talks. Interestingly, I would say most of the Catholics I know personally have a great affection and respect for Fr. Cantalamessa. He is especially beloved among charismatic Catholics. Continue reading →

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